What Is RescueTime?

RescueTime is a time direction &amp; Productivity software firm founded in 2008. The RescueTime program runs in the background of your devices tracking, measuring and categorizing your own activity.

RescueTime is a free app with a premium update That enables more special reporting and attributes like offline moment input. It offers a reporting dash with your data diced chopped and sorted into helpful charts that will assist you manage your time.

The program is based on Peter Drucker’s (the famous Management consultant) maxim that”what gets measured, gets managed.”

RescueTime takes the manual tracking of time And makes it automatic and painless you actually track your own time so that .

That said, there are dozens and dozens of Productivity &amp; time management programs online. What are the actual pros &amp; cons of RescueTime? Here’s what I’ve noticed through the years.

Disclosure — I get referral fees from companies Mentioned on this site. Any data and/or opinions are all based on my expertise as consultant to a paying client or a paying client. Timesheet For Work Hours

Rescuing Your Period

To reiterate, RescumeTime is a productivity tool in the Feel that it helps you enhance your abilities. It gathers data about the apps and sites you use, then creates reports based on that info.

To get started, you create an account and install a Desktop app on your personal computer (s) and optionally a cell program on Android devices. There’s no iOS app because the operating system prevents RescueTime from amassing the information it needs to perform its function. Those programs quietly and invisibly monitor which apps you use and which sites you visit, in addition to the quantity of time you spend on them.

The tough nut to crack is the Way to make sense of all that information. To get the best results, you have to customize your accounts from the RescueTime site and inform the app more about what you believe productive versus unproductive action. The further you fine-tune it to your particular circumstances, the better your results. As an instance, someone who operates in the financing industry may classify reading financial news on web sites such as MarketWatch and FT.com as a productivity job, whereas for me, that is an unproductive use of time.

You can categorize site and each app on a 5-point Scale of very effective, effective, impartial, unproductive, and very unproductive. You could also categorize activity into perform categorizes. By way of example, I record Google Docs as quite productive, and I categorized it as Writing, which is a subcategory of Design and Composition. Looking at Redfin.com is very distracting when I’m trying to function, and I have categorized it .

From the desktop program, there’s a simple set of controllers That allows you to pause RescueTime for a quarter hour, 1 hour, or till tomorrow, providing you easy access to shifting the app off for days or breaks once you wrap up early.

Privacy

When faced with RescueTime’s proposition–We’ll track All you do and give you insights about your customs! –some individuals might, justifiably, worry about their privacy and the safety of information in their own hardware. Should you use sensitive info online or keep sensitive information in your own computers and mobile devices, you’ll want to read RescueTime’s privacy and safety statements closely.

For everybody RescueTime’s privacy policy Contains a summary at the very top, only a couple of stiff lines which are worth reading.

If your concerns are somewhat more relaxed and you simply don’t Want RescueTime tracking you on the weekend, you have control over the times and days the app monitors your behavior. You can easily set it to just watch your activity from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Monday through Friday, or whatever schedule suits you.

Reports

I’ve used RescueTime for years, and I don’t check my Daily, productivity reports. I love to allow the service run in the background so that when I do want to get a better picture of how I’ve been spending my time, a fantastic amount of information is waiting for me.

While I do go through the reports, however, they are Magnificent. I love the variety, providing you get multiple methods of understanding your productivity and customs, from bar graphs and pie graphs that reveal lump amounts of activity, to line things of applications you employed.

One simple but powerful piece of advice RescueTime Supplies is an analysis of when during the daytime you are inclined to be the most productive. I was not surprised to observe that my mind peaks in the morning and slacks off after 2:00 p.m., as that matches pretty well with everything I know about my customs. If you’ve never analyzed your productivity, nevertheless, that might be a useful revelation for you, one that may help you schedule your times more .

The more time you use RescueTime Premium, the more applicable the Data becomes, because you may see your statistics by day, week, month, or year. And as you might expect, you can toggle which times and days RescueTime records your activity so it turns off automatically on weekends, for example. Timesheet For Work Hours

Additional Features

Much of the value you get from RescueTime comes from what You make of this information and how you use that data to affect your behavior. Changing behavior is hard, but getting rich insights doesn’t need to be.

One of those ways RescueTime makes it easy to understand how To interpret all of the data it collects is with a Productivity Pulse score. This daily evaluation, shown as a percent, comes in calculating the percent of time spent on very productive, productive, impartial, unproductive, and incredibly wasteful jobs. To be clear, nobody is advocating you aim to get a 100 percent Productivity Pulse score.

A RescueTime blog post describing the productivity Score notes that the typical score is 67 percent, and the in-house average is 79 percent. Most people need to do some work which isn’t considered”very productive” throughout their day. The whole purpose of using RescueTime will be to help you figure out how to concentrate on productive and incredibly productive tasks when you will need to and possibly save productive activities for times as soon as your ability to concentrate has been waning anyway.

Less productive jobs are not exactly the Exact Same thing as distractions. RescueTime has a straightforward and smart feature for curbing behavior, like getting sucked into distracting websites. A feature called FocusTime, when empowered, blocks your ability to access. It takes a little setup and personalization, but it is quite powerful, after it’s ready to deploy. As an example, let’s say you wish to to finish a record, and to make progress on it, you need to concentrate hardcore for at least the next thirty minutes. Switch FocusTime, and it may block you from taking a look at email, posting on Twitter, checking sports scores, or whatever other sites and actions you deem deflecting.

The RescueTime mobile program has Silence your phone you enable FocusTime. Likewise, you may set up other automation with the support of third party providers IFTTTFree at iTunes Store and Zapier to obstruct or silence additional distractions. For example, you may create a rule using IFTTT (it stands for”if this, then that”) that says,”When I empower FocusTime, then automatically set my Slack status to busy.”

RescueTime also Provides you the Choice Idle moment. Any time RescueTime notices the computer was idle for several minutes in a row, so it pops up a dialogue asking if you’re at a meeting, on the phone, taking break, etc, and permits you to categorize the idle time accordingly.

Advantages of RescueTime

Here is some of the advantages of using RescueTime Over other solutions. Timesheet For Work Hours

Feature Set

At its heart, RescueTime does one thing — monitor time. If you look at it like this, it’s not super unique. Technically, you could do that with a spreadsheet or any of the dozens of apps that are free on the internet.

But RescueTime’s attribute set is special because of The way that it monitors time and exactly what it does with all the data (aka, one you’ll actually use).

RescueTime’s other features focus on producing their Core attribute. Like time-tracking &amp; billing for 15, they do not try to add on features that are complementary. They do not try to get into any side companies.

They do have Attribute in an interesting manner. For example, the Get Focused! Feature blocks deflecting sites and/or apps from running when selected.

They have aims and alarms that Permit You to decide What when X occurs, you want to happen — and RescueTime will do this based on which it’s tracking.

I love RescueTime does Offline Time Tracking. Rather than having to search and put in it in 100% manually, you pick a time interval that’s unlogged and fill in the blank.

You can customize the buttons to make logging Offline time easy and quick.

It’s a minimalist feature set — but that What makes it great. It is well-done, straightforward and simple.

Pricing and Plans

RescueTime offers two tiers of support: Lite (free) and Premium ($9 per month or $72 annually ). Firms or organizations that are looking to use RescueTime across a bunch of individuals pay the exact same speed.

RescueTime Lite offers Monitored her or his period before. The app monitors which websites and applications you use, and how long you spend on or in every one of these. You can categorize every app and website you use on a Productive/Unproductive scale, also RescueTime creates a few basic reports demonstrating the best way to spend your own time. Lite members can set weekly goals, such as”spend X hours each week on productive jobs and fewer than Y moments on faulty items.” It’s possible to get a weekly report email. For reports, you’re confined to a history, however.

Subscribers get everything in the Lite program, Plus reports and features, such as an history. Premium also comes with alerts you can enable for when you hit goals. You can more accurately log time spent away from the computer, noting if you were in a meeting, on a phone call, or simply out to lunch. Additionally, there is a Get Focused alternative, which lets you block websites you place. Timesheet For Work Hours

Comparing RescueTime’s cost to that of other programs Needs an open mind because few apps do exactly what RescueTime does. Qbserve is one and it costs a flat fee of $40.

We can look at more Programs for freelancers that typically include tools for bills. HarvestFree in Harvest is a example. At $12 per person a month for Premium, it costs more than RescueTime, but it has a clear return on investment since it helps ensure more accurate billing. How you will interpret RescueTime’s reports and make better use of your time as a consequence is much less clear.

Toggl Popular among freelancers, costs $9 per month, and it also gives you clear tools for monitoring time spent on jobs with the end aim of billing customers. It has many integration options for connecting with invoicing services, although toggl doesn’t contain its own invoicing tools.

A Couple of apps are closer to RescueTime in what they have to Offer, such as Slife, even though they have a tendency to have fewer attributes even if they are free (and Slife is).

Either way — RescueTime is a no-brainer pricing-wise. It is free to use.

And when you are saved by the reporting/advanced features just 1 hour per month then it is paid for itself even if you are earning US minimum wage.

RescueTime is an investment which makes sense.

Program Quality

A problem with monitoring programs of all kinds is That they have to be on. The”always on” feature can lead to performance issues on notebooks &amp; desktop computers. It can cause battery problems on mobile devices.

But in my own experience, RescueTime causes neither. It is running in my Nexus 5x phone, my Windows PC, along with my Macbook Pro from startup. I’ve never tracked any performance or battery problems.

It’s lightweight and well-built.

I like the fact that the cellular app does not demand Dozens of ridiculous permissions. It requires access but doesn’t attempt to monitor emails, contacts, location, or any of those normal privacy violating permissions other apps request.

It’s quick to set up and syncs with an online dashboard. It pulls in data from all sources and crunches on the information if you’re on the Premium plan or by next day on the program.

Reporting

What’s the purpose of information if it can’t be interpreted by you Or put it to use? Timesheet For Work Hours

RescueTime’s reports solves that issue — and in Ways is the point of using the program.

RescueTime’s Dashboard uses bar charts and Pie graphs to show just what you are (and are not) doing.

You can opt to receive emails reports every day, Week or even month.

And best of all, you can dig into the Reporting with numerous filters and overlays to find out your habits.

It to see that the actual amount of Time that each job takes.

When I trying to find a marketing agency in Atlanta — The time tracked to Gchats and Instant Messages was astonishing. It altered processes not only for me personally, but also my job managers.

Now that I’m on my own — I will see the time that I devote to jobs that matter. I am able to construct my day .

And just to reiterate Built-in into the software. The Dashboard is really on my default — and even reports are pre-built.

It’s all powerful, seamless and quick so that you When assessing your time, are wasting time.

Integrations

Among the Major selling points of RescueTime is their characteristic set minimalism. They do one thing and they do it well.

That said — many people using their merchandise Have time-based software needs. When it’s staff time tracking, charging, project management or anything your time needs usually do not stop with measuring tracking and categorization.

To solve that Issue, RescueTime’s applications Integrates with a assortment. They have guide integrations and an open API with software that is common.

Whether you are a freelancer attempting to incorporate Time tracking into even a project manager that needs to collate team member’s time or invoicing software like FreshBooks, RescueTime will integrate with it.

Disadvantages of RescueTime

Like any software RescueTime is Perfect nor is it the ideal fit for everyone. Here is some pitfalls that I’ve noticed over the years. Timesheet For Work Hours

Default Get Focused! Categories

In general, RescueTime’s categories good. Sites like Reddit, Facebook and Twitter are”Very Distracting”…for many people. And for tracking, RescueTime’s classes are quick &amp; easy to repair.

However, RescueTime’s categories News, sites and research sites’ subdomains.

I can not use the Get Focused! Functionality for almost any Task that needs research (aka visiting a bunch of different websites).

The time I need smart blocking Performance is when I’m doing research for a post

There’s a fine line between this is effective and When I am researching this is distracting. It’d be great to use RescueTime, but the categories are not accurate enough for this to operate.

The Main problem is that the Block Sites function Is unavailable in reverse (ie, add certain sites to block). I am only able to add sites to unblock.

And when I’m visiting websites were blocked by dozen — Manually adding them quickly becomes time wasting.

If you are currently looking for an app that will block only Specific sites — RescueTime isn’t it.

Effectiveness vs. Efficiency

If you do the wrong thing for 18 hours Every Day, Daily with perfect focus — you are still doing the thing that is incorrect.

The most important factor in time direction is to Work on the things — the 20% of time input which will generate 80% of your results.

And that is a element that is 100% on you personally. RescueTime Can not solve that issue.

Actually, in some ways, RescueTime can damage your Attempts by pushing you towards efficient doing over approach, planning and research.

If efficacy is your core issue RescueTime isn’t for you. It’ll only make things worse.

Rather, I’d recommend reading some of these books.

Wrap-up

RescueTime has been an invaluable tool for me. It is not for everybody and has some attribute quirks and disadvantages.

That said, the thing is perspective. It’s easy to think that you”work a ton” or are”not addicted to a phone” or”invest so much time composing” or are”barely ever on Facebook.”

However, the information doesn’t lie. And utilizing RescueTime to Get precise time data onto your digital time will be able to assist your own time is literally rescued by you and place your own life in perspective. Timesheet For Work Hours